


we’ll sit and talk the stars down from the sky

by catefrankie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (apparently this story is sad), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dance of Romance, F/M, One Year Later, Over-Ambitious Attempt at Total Catharsis, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 09:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22453543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catefrankie/pseuds/catefrankie
Summary: She thinks they're probably still in sync.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 52
Kudos: 101
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems





	we’ll sit and talk the stars down from the sky

The worst part, at first, is that it doesn’t even feel that different.

She had been used to feeling a slight prickly sensation, as if she was being watched. Then she’d feel a breeze that didn’t make sense, or hear someone else's breathing when she knew she was alone. And then she’d know he was there. 

For most of the year, of course, she tried to ignore him – meditated with everything she had in her so that the bond would close itself again and he would go away without speaking to her, and sometimes literally ignored him pettily when that didn’t work. And he had ignored her, too. Random moments, scattered throughout a whole year, of them both stiffening and then carefully turning and going about their business as if the other person wasn’t there. For a year they lived their lives back to back, perfectly attuned in their apathy, like a sad, quiet reflection of the explosion of synchronicity in the throne room. 

But they had their moments, didn’t they? A quick brush of their fingers – a saber changing hands. There’s a part of her that feels certain that the connection between them was more important even than her sensitivity to the force, strictly speaking – all the combat training and mystic spirituality in the world would have been for nothing if she wouldn’t have been able to look across a space that was empty and see Ben Solo there. She’s never said so. Whenever his name is spoken, Poe still has to suppress a grimace, and Finn’s forehead creases up – and it’s not like she can blame them. They never saw his change like she did; they never met Ben.

She doesn’t know what her face does when that name is spoken. But she imagines that sometimes, out of nowhere, she gets a shell-shocked look on her face, and looks behind her at nothing.

It’s not even that different. A feeling of not being alone – of being with. A current in the force seemingly out of place. The whisper of a voice.

She knows he’s there, like before. 

But she can’t always see him.

She thinks they’re probably still in sync; she pictures him, back to back with her. But more often than not, it is only that. She’s confident it is really him, sure she’s not imagining it. She hears his voice, sometimes – but what is there she wouldn’t give to be able to see him, solid and taking up all the space in the room. To be sure of him in the way she only ever was when he was in front of her, when she could meet his eyes and know who he was and what he was thinking. There was always more of Ben in his eyes than there was in his voice.

They have talked, in brief stolen moments, here and there. Each of them is quick to apologize, and each quick to talk over the other’s apologies. Sometimes they talk about her life, her challenges and her dilemmas. Most often she just hears the whisper of her name – a quiet reminder that the force is with her – a sweet assurance that he has faith in her.

And when he does appear, it’s not like everything can stop. She’s started to rush towards him a couple of times – once he immediately disappeared, she suspects on account of being overcome by emotion. The second time he just smiled at her and shook his head, nodded in the direction of the student who was staring at her open-mouthed and awed as she stared smilingly apparently at nothing, and she had to finish her lesson with him as a silent audience. 

Life has to go on, even with ghosts. And before she knows it, an entire year has passed. 

There was a whole, week-long festival planned in commemoration of what Poe has been calling the “Rising”: the moment when regular people all over the galaxy stood up and came to the defense of their freedom and their way of life, when the last battle was won in the skies over their oldest enemy. It wasn’t that people didn’t know about Rey’s defeat of Palpatine, Poe told her once; it was that no one had been there, no one had seen it happen in order to pass on the story. He says everyone is grateful to her, it’s just easier for them to celebrate the victory that their friends and comrades had accomplished than the one won by the still unfamiliar jedi. She doesn’t mind. It doesn’t feel like much happened worth celebrating on the ground of Exegol: she came all too close to falling, and then the person who saved her died – there’s no catchy name for a holiday there. So when Poe invited her to speak at the ceremony, she turned him down without having to think too hard. She couldn’t get out of attending, though, and had to settle for showing up very late on the second-to-last day. 

Chewie’s there to meet her X-wing, and he gives her a pretty good scolding which she tries to receive in seriousness, but he keeps mussing her hair and it makes her want to laugh. BB8 spins around her in tight circles and then follows her extra closely as if he thinks she could leave at any moment, but when they bring her to Poe he just raises his eyebrows, like he’s not surprised. “I don’t have it in me to attend parties for seven whole days,” Rey says, not very repentant.

Poe snorts, says drily, “Well, I’m glad you’ll be here for the last night, at least.” He adds, begrudging, “And you probably missed the worst of it. The first couple days were pretty wild, but things have calmed way down.”

“REY!”

She turns to see Finn barreling towards her, and then his arms are around her and she’s back in the first embrace she can remember. When he releases her, she’s sees no judgment or resentment in his face, nothing but open-hearted welcome – and the fact that he’s clearly absolutely wrecked. He’s wearing what looks like six different strings of beads; there’s some kind of crown of feathers on his head, and he has various colors of sparkling dye spattered all over his clothes, which look like they might once have been formal. He grins at her shock; Poe says, “Then again, some people have more energy than others.” 

Finn thumps him on the back. “You missed it!” he tells Rey.

“Missed what?” she says. “Was there a commemorative bath in a trash-compactor, in honor of the first war?” 

Finn laughs, unfazed, and slings an arm around her, pulling Poe in with his other arm, but Poe only allows it for a moment before he ducks away and brushes glitter-dust off his shoulders, grumbling. “Don’t worry,” Finn says, “we can fit a week’s worth of celebrating into tomorrow.”

“I’m so relieved,” Rey answers, smiling despite herself.

“Unless you want to start now?” Finn says.

“Sorry, there’s nothing I want to start now but sleeping.”

“There’s already a space set up for you,” Poe puts in. “Finn can take you. I have to talk to some of the locals about transporting in some more food; we’re low.”

“If you need me to make a run early tomorrow I can,” Rey says, hopeful. Poe just rolls his eyes and snorts again, and then Finn is pulling her away towards the haphazardly set-up campsites. “How’s he been handling it?” she asks.

“As expected, he’s been doing his best to treat party-planning like an invasion,” Finn says. “And how’s padawan-searching?” 

“I don’t think they’re padawans, technically,” she answers. “Padawan describes a one-on-one relationship with a master, I’m just giving rudimentary lessons in balance to anybody who wants them.” 

“And a free lightsaber?”

“To every force-sensitive four-year-old I can find.”

He laughs, and pulls her down to plant a kiss on the top of her head. “In a few years there will be more jedi than you’ll know what to do with.”

“If there was _one_ more I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“You will.” He squeezes her shoulder and lets her go to gesture at a small-ish tent. “This is yours. Mine’s a few down that way. Rose is nearby somewhere.” He makes a face. “She would probably have come out to meet you, but I’m pretty sure she’s already been asleep for hours.”

Rey grins. “Has anybody been able to keep up with you?”

“Very few,” he says, mock-solemn. “All the former trooper-deserters are thinking about deserting this festival and setting up our own celebration somewhere else. We have a previously untested tolerance for fun, and we’re just getting started.”

“I’m glad you’re having fun.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Tomorrow it’s your turn.”

And, to her slight surprise, it is fun.

Because it’s the last day, everyone is very affectionate, clinging to one another before they all have to say goodbye again. There are memorials set up for the dead, and everywhere she looks she can see people smiling through tears – it wasn’t for nothing, all the sacrifices allowed everyone to be here, together. Prayers and songs spring up of their own accord and then fade away again. Those who served in the rebellion or took part in the Rising find themselves being handed small tokens from nearly every culture represented at the festival, and Rey is soon bedecked in beads, feathers, and scarves, herself. 

For much of the morning Poe takes her around to introduce her to representatives sent from fledgling governments, old supporters of the rebellion, and anyone trying to figure out how to gather and work with force-sensitives. She shakes hands and smiles when they say they’re reassured by the fact that the jedi aren’t wholly gone, but she’s not a diplomat, and eventually Poe gives up and lets her be swarmed by a gaggle of children who’ve been trailing a safe distance behind her for hours. She levitates pebbles for them until Finn and Zorii come to take her away, and Zorii insists on teaching her each one of the dances that are beginning. 

There’s a dance like a triumphant procession, everyone doing the same steps in a crowd, and then a dance in long lines where partners trade off and meet each other again – and then a dance in pairs followed by a dance from a non-humanoid culture, both of which they sit out, to watch and toss color onto the dancers. Finn drags her back into the fray for the next lines dance, and she gamely submits. She can hear the whispers that follow her down the line: “jedi”, “Emperor-Killer”, “Skywalker”, and the couples they dance with never take her hand with the same certainty with which they seem to take their partners’. But Finn holds her firmly, and makes sardonic faces whenever he missteps, which is frequently, and swings her into the air whenever they spin, and together they galumph and careen chaotically together until the music comes to an end. 

Finn is trying to negotiate a third dance when Rose blessedly appears and steals Rey away to a table nestled in a quiet corner, supporting a slightly selfish amount of food that they’ve set aside for their little group. For a moment the wild glory of the festival fades into the background; they watch the dancing from a ways off and eat the food that Poe shouldn’t have worried they’d run out of, and she can quietly talk and laugh without the constant awareness of being seen talking and laughing. Chewie joins them for a while. Beaumont and Connix come along, bearing punch for the table. Finn is perpetually in and out, and Poe manages to escape his nebulous duties for a whole hour together, in which he does nothing but eat and complain about how much he’d rather be flying. 

The sun reaches ever closer to the horizon. Bonfires begin to go up, all over the festival. The same dances continue, but they go on longer, and people are holding their partners a little closer. Poe sees Zorii across the crowd and goes after her; Finn reappears, complaining that Chewie cut in while he was dancing with Maz and begging Rose to please dance with him. Rose laughs at him and allows herself to be pulled away, beckoning to Rey to follow, but Rey waves them off. Beau looks a question at Rey, but she shakes her head, and then Beau trails after Finn and Rose to find another partner – he and Rey are friendly, but they haven’t spent much time together apart from the group. Few of the friendships she’s formed since taking on the Skywalker legacy have managed to rise to the level of the friendships she made before, when she was Rey from Nowhere. 

It’s not bad – she picks at Poe’s leftovers, listens idly to the strains of music getting harder to make out as more and more musicians call it a night. It’s kind of nice, like celebrating with everyone in another way, from afar. Watching all their happiness without interfering in it, guarding it, keeping its peace: the old jedi way. 

There’s a shift, like a sigh in the force - the air changes. The back of her neck prickles. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, and smiles.

“You’re alone.”

His voice comes from just behind her shoulder; it’s an accusation. She glances behind her – and meets Ben’s eyes. 

“So are you,” she shoots back.

It’s an old joke of theirs, but he smiles anyway and she beams back at him. “You look pretty,” he offers.

She looks down at her dress. It was simple and presentable enough when she put it on this morning, but she rivals Finn in dishevelment now. She glances back up at him, briefly self-conscious – he never saw her in a dress, did he – but the bashful duck of the head suggests he’s serious. She does the tiniest twirl so that they’re face to face, shedding excess color dust in a circle, and shrugs at him. “Thanks.”

“You’re not going to say I don’t look so bad myself?” he says, pulling at the collar on his shirt, making it even more askew than it usually is. 

“Actually, you’re a little under-dressed,” she says, playing along. “And that’s coming from me.”

“They should really teach this during apprenticeship,” he says, “don’t get caught becoming one with the force in your undershirt.”

“Little-known risk of being a jedi.”

He smiles, only a little ruefully. He nods at something over her shoulder, asks, “Why aren’t you dancing?”

“I was,” she says.

“Do you know this one?”

She cocks her head and tries to pick out the tune, glances behind her at the lines forming. “I think Zorii taught me, but they’re playing it slower.”

“You remember how?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

She looks at him askance. “I’m not going to go dance with somebody I hardly know and leave you here.”

“No,” he agrees. 

“So?”

“I was thinking you could do it with me.” 

She tilts her head to look him full in the face – he’s gazing at her steadily in a way that’s hard to bear. She reaches out to brush his arm and feels nothing but night air. “We can’t.”

He grimaces. “I know. I’m not very good at this, you don’t have to rub it in. But there’s not much touching in this dance at all, and no partner switching.” 

She tries to run through the steps mentally. The music starts up, faintly.

“Here,” he says, and holds up his hand palm out. 

She stretches out a hand as if to press it to his and stops a fraction of an inch away. His hand dwarfs hers. She looks up from their almost-but-not entangled fingers to meet his eyes.

“And now we turn,” he says.

“I know how it goes,” she says before she can stop herself. He grins. And they turn – she reaches into the force and imagines the energy between them both, holding them together, keeping them just apart. It feels a little like levitating. The measure ends; they switch hands and turn the opposite direction. They step into each other, and out, and loop around each other back to back. 

They step in again – “You planned this, didn’t you?” Rey asks. They step out. 

“Always with the accusations,” Ben says, and they execute a quick half turn around each other that all the other couples manage by grasping each other around the waist. They have nothing to keep them together but locked eyes; it’s enough. 

“You’re good at this,” Rey admits. 

He ought to take her hand and pass her in a circle around him; he offers her his hand and she lets her fingertips hover above his. “Only because it’s you,” he answers. 

She walks around him, tracing where their joined hands would have been – they spin away from each other, they spin back, and now he’s standing at her back, one hand hovering around her waist and the other almost supporting her hand. They promenade up and down once, weaving around other imaginary couples in their quiet corner of the festival. He pretends to twirl her, and the set starts over, and they’re palm to palm again.

“We never got to dance,” she says, surprising herself.

“We’re dancing now,” he answers. 

And they are. She’s so attuned to his presence that she can follow him effortlessly, like there are ribbons binding them together whenever they can’t touch. They circle around one another like they’ve been doing it all their lives. In a way, they have.

But still.

“Ben,” she says. “There are so many things we never got to do.” 

“We’ll do them,” he says. 

And maybe they will – maybe they can trace the steps together of most of the things they missed out on. Maybe they can mark out a life together like they’ve marked out the dance, skipping over the moments where they ought to hold each other, pretending that knowing where the other will be is the same as leading them by the hand.

Voices float over on the breeze – she’s not sure if they’re from upwind of the festival or from a distant force-vision – children’s voices, laughing. “Not all of them,” she says.

“No,” Ben admits. “But…we would have?”

He looks at her, and she looks back.

“Yes,” he says, wonderingly, “we would have.”

“We would have,” she agrees. Then adds: “I _miss_ you.”

“If I could’ve been here with you, I would be.” 

“I know,” she says, and then wrinkles her nose at the cliché. 

He’s quiet for a moment, leading her carefully through the last steps of the set. “Why don’t you let me do the waiting,” he says, finally. Their palms come up, mirrored. She looks at him questioningly. “You’ve done enough,” he says. “Your whole life, Rey, you were waiting for something.”

“For you,” she says.

“For me, like I was waiting for you,” he acknowledges. “But – you never really got to stop. You’re still waiting, and I’m not coming back, Rey – but you’ll be joining me, someday. So, you live your life. And I’ll wait for you.” 

She considers. “Am I supposed to forget you?”

“I hope not,” he says, simply. “But you don’t have to look for me everywhere. I’m always here. And I’ll be waiting for you –” they spin together, “– when you finally come home.”

He offers her his hand – instinctively, she takes it. 

He freezes only for a moment, and then he squeezes her hand, the choreography abandoned, his face crinkled in a wide smile. Carefully, he twirls her, out of time with the music, in their own world apart from everything else; she lets him, and then steps in, steadies herself with one hand on his chest. She smiles up at him, and he takes a deep breath; she stands still and waits. 

As always, he reads her intention in her eyes. 

He leans down and kisses her, gently, one arm wrapping tight around her waist and the other hand releasing hers to cup her face. When they part, he stays inches away, staring intently into her eyes, but after a few moments his seriousness breaks and he grins and shows her his fingers – the fingertips color-stained with the dust that’s trapped in her hair. She laughs, quietly, and drops her head to rest on his chest; he strokes her hair.

A long, quiet moment passes. It will probably be a long time before they can have this in any permanent way, a long time before she can take his hand and not let it go – but the taste of it helps. It feels a bit like being at peace. 

Ben says softly, “As long as the force is with you, I will be. Always.”

And then the force around and between them changes, like taking a deep breath before diving underwater. She looks up in time to see him smile. And then he’s gone.

The sounds of the festival bleed back into Rey’s awareness, and with an effort she tears herself away from staring into empty space and looks out over the crowd. 

Poe has gotten Zorii to dance with him, and looks incomparably smug about it. Rose and Finn are dancing nearby, but don’t appear to know the steps, and are just twirling each other haphazardly and laughing. Finn catches Rey watching and waves at her to join them, and she takes a deep breath and jogs over. 

He sees the look in her eyes, and she thinks he probably guesses. But then he takes her hand, grounding her in the here-and-now, and Rose takes the other one, and the three of them swing around in a circle faster than the music, and twist and twirl until they’re tangled up and out of breath from laughing. Then they reform their circle around Poe and Zorii while Poe yells at them to go away and let him dance; Chewie’s laughing at them, and BB8 is rolling in circles just far enough away so that he doesn’t squash anyone’s toes. She can’t hear any whispers from the crowd; everyone is singing and laughing and crying together, it doesn’t matter that she’s crying, too. 

Her true belonging is ahead – but then, isn’t it for everyone? She can belong here, for a while.

Ben will wait.

**Author's Note:**

> It was like this: I saw tros on Saturday. I spent 9am to 10pm on Sunday processing, and then wrote the bulk of this in the following 36 hours. I have seen tros only once, and tlj all of twice. My only concession to the breadth of the star wars canon was looking up four names, of various characters and places. Don’t ask me which planet this is on. All the sincere, non-quippy dialogue is so far out of my wheelhouse it’s not even funny.
> 
> Title from Mumford & Sons’ “Beloved”.
> 
> Inspired by a year of contra dance and waltz. And besides, all my other main ships have a dance scene. It’s only fair.
> 
> visit me on tumblr: catefrankie.tumblr.com


End file.
